Russ wrote:“At a point in time when people are about to suffer from mitochondrial inadequacy in their brain, the aim of the study [with Takeda] is to double the number of mitochondria

This was an interesting new study on decanoic acid (C10 in MCT oil.): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24383952" We propose that decanoic acid (C10) results in increased mitochondrial number. Our data suggest that this may occur via the activation of the PPARγ receptor and its target genes involved in mitochondrial biogenesis. This finding could be of significant benefit to epilepsy patients who are currently on a strict ketogenic diet. Evidence that C10 on its own can modulate mitochondrial number raises the possibility that a simplified and less stringent C10-based diet could be developed."

Just stumbled upon this site and feel I can add some insight here. Allen Roses' lab at Duke discovered the link between apoE4 and Alzheimer's disease in 1993. In an amazing bit of hypocrisy, the Alzheimer's field acknowledge the clear link between apoE4 and AD, and promptly ignored it. To this day, the apoE4 field remains a marginalized aspect of the huge Alzheimer's research engine, although it is gaining a higher profile with each passing day.

Allen Roses left Duke in the late 1990s to join GSK, makers of Rosiglitzone. He was involved in an Alzheimer's trial where they separated out patients after the fact based on APOE status. The results seemed to show that Rosiglitazone helped APOE3, but not APOE4 Alzheimer's patients. GSK subsequently repeated the study on a larger scale and the entire thing fell apart.

Tomm40 is an adjacent gene to APOE and an initial study suggest that certain variations of Tomm40 increased risk of Alzheimer's. However, some subsequent work has suggested that all of the risk was really mediated by APOE4.

The TOMM40 study is designed to take people at risk for Alzheimer's disease and provide them pioglitazone, a similar drug to rosiglitazone. Rosiglitazone is not good at getting to the brain and pioglitazone is not much better.

I think the TOMM40 study is interesting, but unfortunately I think it has a fairly low chance of success.

Welcome Harrison, thanks for the background. It's really disappointing to see the lack of attention given to the gene that confers the highest risk of Alzheimer's. We're trying to make some noise and change that

Thanks for the Welcome, Julie. It really makes me shake my head when 90% or so of Alzheimer's research continues to be based on gene mutations that are in 5% of patients. With the failures of the Amyloid-based treatments, I think the focus on APOE will continue to grow. As you undoubtedly know, there is a small number of dedicated labs working on APOE, such as the Gladstone group (it would be great to be able to go to the event at the end of the month), and some other spread across the country (http://apoereceptors.anat.uic.edu/index.html).Hopefully this will change for the better.

asiagillett wrote:J11 I have actually been taking a CoQ-10/PQQ blend from Pure Encapsulations. I have been really trying to tweak the supplements and downsize so was happy to find 2 IMO important ones.

For a while, I was taking the Jarrow CoQ10 (ubiquinol -100mg) + BioPQQ (10mg) blend. I had hoped it would be energizing, but I thought it actually felt sort of relaxing. Reading this article (and some googling around), I read some people might experience fatigue or feel tired/sleepy from that form (although from other googling around, the antioxidant ubiquinol-form does usually seem like the best form.) I did a big shootout of various coq10's I could find online (there are way too many options) and ended up going with jarrow "pharmaceutical grade" plain ubiquinone. Dr Sinatra is big on CoQ10 and recommends a water soluble form (Hydro "Q-sorb") - I looked up the patent and that seems to be a cyclodextrin-bound form. Checking out pure encapsulations SR-coq10 w/ pqq and comparing patents, that looks like the same stuff. I might try that next time around (although 20mg of PQQ seems like a lot, when most natural sources are listed in nanograms). Thanks for the heads up!

PQQ would seem to make quite a bit of sense. It is surprising that more research has not been done with it.It would be especially interesting if they might be able to make it into a mito form--Mito-PQQ (as in Mitoq etc.).

Apod, after reading the study you posted about decanoic acid (C10) increasing the number of mitochondria, I started looking at the commercially available MCT oils to see what percentage of C10 they contained.

Several had none at all: However, I did find that Left Coast Performance makes an MCT oil that contains a little over 40% C10.